MARIA MINERVA||KRAAK GALLERY||6/2/13

Recycling Night. Highlight of the wheelie bins’ fortnight. I get a garbage guard of honour. The hot ticket tonight is unarguably Thurston Moore and Michael Chapman at Band On The Wall, but my interest was piqued by this hot shit, Pitchfork-adored, up-and-coming Estonian songstress whose alliterational name with its connotations of legendary greatness is never far from superlative descriptions like ‘sensual’, ‘dreamy’, ‘narcotic’, ‘hazy’ or even “libidinous swirl”. This being the week in which Kevin Shields refrigerated Hades, she’s going to have her work cut-out for her with this particular critic, whose two-day attempt at trying to review the solid gold soma of ‘m b v’ resulted in only 17 words squeezed out on Twitter:

There has never been a good enough word for love. Which is why My Bloody Valentine exist.

I’m propelled toward this particular gig on the pumping-blood chugging undercurrent and tremolo of tumultuous stomach butterflies born of pubic pupae. I feel like dropping to my knees, sobbing penitentially, and reciprocating this total blow job of my soul.

No.

Oh, the guilt of cum drying on one’s opposable thumbs. Surely we mean so much more than that? I’d forgotten there was music that could make my heart stop and hair stand-on-end, like damp lips exhaling hot minuscule droplets across my ear, and I can’t stop listening. Maria, this evening’s entertainment is going to have to be immaculately conceived. I’m not sure which way the waxed moustaches that are scattered around The Castle, are going to go – whether they’ve got their thirst-on for Moore, or Minerva.

Kraak is in the thrall of Ruf Dug. For me, DJs have always looked like a man on amphetamine washing the pots with a phone nestled between shoulder and head, and require a similar amount of talent. Doug seems to be repackaging someone else’s efforts and sending the odd shout of “Yeah!” reverberating around the place aided by a heavy smattering of Dub Reggae-echo.

Maria owns the stage with all the black-assed panache of a menopausal drama tutor, flailing the arm that isn’t operating her console around for emphasis. She soon becomes engulfed in a miasma of dry ice, and my attempts at picking her out with my sporadically flashing camera result mainly in some Lynchian shots of her killer-tits lazing mid ribcage, bound-up in black American Apparel spandex leotard.

Sonically it’s akin the kind of music a vague acquaintance accompanied by three other student dullards with feminist pretensions would hijack the stereo of a shared house-with while you’re watching ‘Punch Drunk Love’ before cajoling everyone into smoking experimental-grade skunk and making you watch his Tesco DVD-R of ‘Zeitgeist’ with the sound turned-down.

One among their number has whiteyed-out on the only available bed.

Another of them, holding-out on a marginal amount of Ketamine until he has run himself a bath is cack-handedly trying to squeeze then suck-up the constituents of a smashed, desiccated insect out of the water into the butt hole of a rubber duck.
Mercifully, Maria’s set isn’t as long as such a scenario. I get on the bus and snuggle-up to ‘m b v’ sighing into my ear holes.

I’m jabbed in the arm by a girl in a ‘Don’t Look Now’ duffel coat, who scuttles off an empty bus, yanking me out of a concrete sleep two miles from where I need to be, an hour after I boarded. I skip my iPod back to the tracks that I’ve missed and saunter invincibly through the park the scallies like to frequent after dark.